1. Technical Field
The present disclosure, inter alia, relates to the use of steel pipes as communication medium for data transmission and reception.
2. Description of Related Art
Piezoelectric sensors have long been used for inspecting the integrity of large civil structures such as pipes, offshore platforms, bridges, railways, etc. Upon excitation, active acoustic sensor, or actuators, can generate elastic waves that propagate a long distance, interrogate structures for possible defects, thus providing information of the operating conditions of the structure. With the advancement of sensor technology and emerging signal and data processing techniques, much effort has been devoted to the development of integrated monitoring systems for large civil structures. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a systematic methodology for continuously assessing the integrity of a structure for the identification of damage. SHM is increasingly being deployed to monitor and predict vulnerabilities in large civil infrastructures to prevent critical failure.
In the classic communication theory, information bearing signals are modulated and excited from a transmitter; the excitation signals propagate through physical medium, such as air, water, or cable, and are received by a receiver. The received signals are demodulated. The transmitted information is then recovered. For example, in wireless communication systems, electromagnetic signals are used as carriers for data transmission. The transmission medium is air. In underwater acoustic communication, acoustical signals are utilized for transmitting information. The transmission medium is water. In many existing SHM sensor network applications, conventional schemes such as wireless radio communication and acoustical communication are adopted and modified for data communication.
However, research has shown that in many real-life applications, conventional communication schemes are inapplicable or undesirable. For example, for pipes that are buried underground or for hollow sub-sea structures in offshore platforms, radio communication is difficult to realize because electromagnetic wave signals suffer severe decay in soil or water which results in very short transmission range.
Therefore, there is a need to address these shortcoming and disadvantages of conventional communication schemes for structural health monitoring applications.